The chemist with x-ray vision
Mike Sutton tells the tale of John Kendrew and his work on the structure of myoglobin
2017 sees 100 years since the birth of protein crystallographer John Kendrew, 1962 Nobel prize laureate in chemistry. He shared the prize with Max Perutz ‘for their studies of the structures of globular proteins’. Kendrew began studying proteins at the UK’s Medical Research Council Lab for Molecular Biology in Cambridge in after the second world war. He focused on myoglobin – used in the body to store oxygen – which has a molecular weight around 17,000. Finding its structure with limited computing power was challenging to say the least.